If you are a teacher of kids ~12-18 years old, you are invited to participate in our evaluation! We warmly, eagerly and happily invite you! We have an Amazon gift certificate to pay you back for your time.

Melanie Stegman, yours truly, will be presenting her research on Immune Attack, development of the sequal and all about using game to teach and learn. April 23, 6PM. At the FabLab on North Capitol at P. If you have made a game, bring it with you! Please Register Here.

Video Games can teach science by presenting and requiring your interaction with complex 3D models of things you otherwise need to imagine because they are too small, to rare, or too far away to see.

Video games can also teach science to you if you decide to MAKE your own video game. If you design it on paper you are doing systems thinking, planning, designing, and considering human computer interactions. If you program a game you are learning to convert a designer’s instructions accurately, how to creatively solve programming problems, and how to optimize your system.

Video Games can also be made about science, as well. If you make a game about science, then you are learning the science yourself and everyone who plays your game may learn, to.

Have you made a video game? Would you like to show it off? Have you ever submitted it to a contest, like the STEM Video Game Challenge? Have you almost created a game and want to get some feedback? Are you just curious about what anyone could actually be learning from a video game?
Then come out and meet game developer and many other types of design and maker people at Fab Lab DC.

Melanie will talk about Immune Attack and what students are learning. There will be time before and after the presentation to try out some other great science games:

History of Biology
Minesweeper
Fold It
Cellcraft
You Make Me Sick
EtRNAYou Make Me Sick

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This event is an official part of the month long USA Science and Engineering Festival. The Finale Expo will be April 29-30 in the DC Convention Center April 27-29th. Come out and meet Melanie at the FAS booth, talk with scientists in the “Encounter’s with Scientists” booth (FAS hour is 11AM Sunday the 29th) and meet the Fab Lab people in their booth #3050!

This event is an official part of the month long USA Science and Engineering Festival. The Finale Expo will be April 29-30 in the DC Convention Center April 27-29th. Come out and meet Melanie at the FAS booth, talk with scientists in the “Encouter’s with Scientists” booth (FAS hour is 11AM Sunday the 29th) and meet the Fab Lab DC people at their booth (#3050)!

Everyone seems to have an opinion about teacher’s role in the classroom of the future. Some claim that teachers should get out of the way and let kids simply have unfettered access to the internet. Others imagine a classroom in which teachers curate the vast world of information that is available and facilitate students’ understanding. Certainly, there is more to learn in any subject than any one person could be an expert in. How can we take the best advantage of technology in the classroom?

Please share your comments below! I am preparing a blog post addressing the role of teachers in the future, and I would appreciate your thoughts and any resources!

To build appreciation for the science of immunology, we need to find the fun in it.

Many thousands of people spend their lives in windowless laboratories, standing day in and day out, barely speaking to their silent lab mates, often working in a 4°C room, or holding their arms up for hours while they conduct their experiments inside the awkward, but sterile cell culture hood.

Why are they doing this?

They are immunologists. Immunologists address the problems of the immune system that their fellow humans have to live with, like Leukemia, AIDS, allergies and autoimmune disorders. Immunologists use biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology and genetics to look for ways to help patients and prevent disease.

So, we could simply say that these immunologists are serving their fellow man. But their motivation is not simply to help mankind. Something else drives them to spend those days in a tissue culture hood counting thousands of white blood cells.

Why did these immunologists take the lab path? Why didn’t they become social workers, firemen or even medical doctors? Well, I’ll tell you. Immunology is fun. Immunology involves watching cells identify and destroy other cells. These cells appear to be very similar to every other cell in the universe. These cells have outer membranes, nuclei, DNA and proteins that are almost indistinguishable from every other cell.

The questions are why this particular cell kills bacteria. Why doesn’t this cell kill all types of bacteria? Why does this cell in some people, not kill bacteria? The answers involve making endless comparisons between healthy and sick patients, between pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria, between humans and mice and between mice and flies.

So, Immunology is a puzzle. How does the puzzle work? We collect up as many clues as we can, we make a guess, we do an experiment and we try to figure out whether our idea was correct. We compare what we thought would happen to what did happen.

We have tools we can use. And we have rules for addressing these puzzles. We have several paths that others have taken before us that guide our way: We have biochemistry, cell biology, genetics, chemistry and physics. Each of these paths have their own rules and their own tools.

If you could jump in and try out these tools, and attempt a few of the puzzles yourself, then you would understand how immunology works. You would experience the fun! This is what we are doing with Immune Attack 2.0: we are letting you play Immunology… without the hours of standing in a windowless lab.

Wonder whether your students will like Immune Attack? Wonder whether it is game enough to hold their attention? Well watch this video.

And oh, if you work for a AAA video game company you can reach me by email!

Thank you to Debbie Kovesdy, her students and the biology teachers who participated in our evaluation. If YOU would like your students to participate in our evaluation, please let me know! We need more students to strengthen our data… We have significant gains in LEARNING and CONFIDENCE. Be a part of a revolution in learning and in gaming!

If you want to design a game that teaches something, first define carefully what that thing is. Second, design your game to require the player to learn that thing in order to win your game. This concept is very important for Serious Game designers, but it is also very important for every game designer.

As Soren Johnson said in his GDC2010 Serious Games Summit Keynote address, “Theme is not meaning.” If you want to make a game about diplomacy, you must require the player to cooperate with other players, and allow them chances to communicate, and you call the game Diplomacy. But if you want to teach players to take chances and to use advantages they have over other players to win as individuals, then you create the game Risk. Both of these games have the same theme: They are both about war and strategy. But they teach very different aspects of war and strategy. These two games, Soren Johnson explains, clearly demonstrate the difference between theme and meaning.

Currently we are hard at work defining what we want players of Immune Attack 2.0 to learn and how we will require them to learn and then use that knowledge to win our game. We have drawn from several sources and many long discussions with our Scientific Advisory Group for our learning objectives. However, as we get into the technical, artistic and general restrictions of actual game development, it is easy to slip away from our goal. The mechanics should teach the learning objectives and we have the mechanism all drawn out on paper, but do we have the processing power to make that mechanism work in our game engine on school computers? Soon we make a compromise, and then another… The only way to avoid creating a mechanic that is irrelevant is to continuously reevaluate our mechanism compared to our learning objectives.

For example, if you want players to learn the lyrics to Beatles songs, you give them points only when they sing the words from memory. But if you want the player to learn to sing in key, you let them see the words but only give points when they are on key. When your programmer tells you that the lyrics don’t fit on the screen…… what do you do? Your objective is to teach singing on key… how do you stay on target? I’ll be able to give more specific details about IA2 development in the future…

Bonus paragraph: At GDC 2010 several speakers mentioned Spore as an example of a game that was intended to be about something, but the core mechanic was actually about something else. Evolution is, as you know, a random process that causes some creatures to be born more fit for their environment than others. Spore was a game where you choose for yourself at each step what you want your creature to look like. So the joke is that Spore was supposed to be about Evolution, but it ended up being about Intelligent Design!

At the USA Science and Engineering Expo, we had a great time introducing our “free Video Game” to 4000 people. While kids of all ages ran into our booth to see for themselves whether Immune Attack was any good or not, parents were happy to hear that our video game is about white blood cells fighting bacteria. The main character isn’t a military character, it’s a Microbot. It’s main weapon is a ray gun that activates proteins.

The crowd at the USA Science and Engineering expo was curious and eager to hear about real science! Some high school kids wanted to talk about careers in science. FAS is a science policy think tank, so we had plenty to talk about! Additionally, video game production requires many different types of scientific, mathematical and engineering related skills. Someone needs to design the game and designing means testing to find out whether the game is fun. Testing means experimental design! Which audience finds your game fun? And what is your control game? Then someone will program the game. Someone else is an expert at drawing three-dimensional objects using software like Maya, Studio Max, or Cinema4D. Then still another artist uses other software to create all of the backgrounds. Then another artist uses more technology to create the characters. And if you are making a realistic video game, then someone serves as a subject matter expert and makes sure the historical context is correct, or that the science in the Microbot is accurate… I could go on and on. See below for links to art and biological science in particular:

I enjoyed meeting all of you. Please support technology in our schools! Why? Because you can’t see viruses, you can’t see bacteria. You can’t see proteins. But you can see them in a video game! Imagine learning soccer, but never being shown the field. Previously, we did not have ways to see bacteria and proteins, but now we do! And the new data is being used by many people in the Medical Illustration Field to create videos and diagrams that explain the molecular science that affects our everyday lives.